Tales of Wonder by Lord Dunsany
The Three Infernal Jokes
This is the story that the desolate man told to me on the lonelyHighland road one autumn evening with winter coming on and the stagsroaring.
The saddening twilight, the mountain already black, the dreadfulmelancholy of the stags' voices, his friendless mournful face, allseemed to be of some most sorrowful play staged in that valley by anoutcast god, a lonely play of which the hills were part and he theonly actor.
For long we watched each other drawing out of the solitudes of thoseforsaken spaces. Then when we met he spoke.
"I will tell you a thing that will make you die of laughter. I willkeep it to myself no longer. But first I must tell you how I came byit."
I do not give the story in his words with all his woeful interjectionsand the misery of his frantic self-reproaches for I would not conveyunnecessarily to my readers that atmosphere of sadness that was aboutall he said and that seemed to go with him where-ever he moved.
It seems that he had been a member of a club, a West-end club hecalled it, a respectable but quite inferior affair, probably in theCity: agents belonged to it, fire insurance mostly, but life insuranceand motor-agents too, it was in fact a touts' club. It seems that afew of them one evening, forgetting for a moment their encyclopediasand non-stop tyres, were talking loudly over a card-table when thegame had ended about their personal virtues, and a very little manwith waxed moustaches who disliked the taste of wine was boastingheartily of his temperance. It was then that he who told this mournfulstory, drawn on by the boasts of others, leaned forward a little overthe green baize into the light of the two guttering candles andrevealed, no doubt a little shyly, his own extraordinary virtue. Onewoman was to him as ugly as another.
And the silenced boasters rose and went home to bed leaving him allalone, as he supposed, with his unequalled virtue. And yet he was notalone, for when the rest had gone there arose a member out of a deeparm-chair at the dark end of the room and walked across to him, a manwhose occupation he did not know and only now suspects.
"You have," said the stranger, "a surpassing virtue."
"I have no possible use for it," my poor friend replied.
"Then doubtless you would sell it cheap," said the stranger.
Something in the man's manner or appearance made the desolate tellerof this mournful tale feel his own inferiority, which probably madehim feel acutely shy, so that his mind abased itself as an Orientaldoes his body in the presence of a superior, or perhaps he was sleepy,or merely a little drunk. Whatever it was he only mumbled, "O yes,"instead of contradicting so mad a remark. And the stranger led the wayto the room where the telephone was.
"I think you will find my firm will give a good price for it," hesaid: and without more ado he began with a pair of pincers to cut thewire of the telephone and the receiver. The old waiter who lookedafter the club they had left shuffling round the other room puttingthings away for the night.
"Whatever are you doing of?" said my friend.
"This way," said the stranger. Along a passage they went and away tothe back of the club and there the stranger leaned out of a window andfastened the severed wires to the lightning conductor. My friend hasno doubt of that, a broad ribbon of copper, half an inch wide, perhapswider, running down from the roof to the earth.
"Hell," said the stranger with his mouth to the telephone; thensilence for a while with his ear to the receiver, leaning out of thewindow. And then my friend heard his poor virtue being several timesrepeated, and then words like Yes and No.
"They offer you three jokes," said the stranger, "which shall make allwho hear them simply die of laughter."
I think my friend was reluctant then to have anything more to do withit, he wanted to go home; he said he didn't want jokes.
"They think very highly of your virtue," I said the stranger. And atthat, odd as it seems, my friend wavered, for logically if theythought highly of the goods they should have paid a higher price.
"O all right," he said. The extraordinary document that the agent drewfrom his pocket ran something like this:
"I . . . . . in consideration of three new jokes received from Mr.Montagu-Montague, hereinafter to be called the agent, and warranted tobe as by him stated and described, do assign to him, yield, abrogateand give up all recognitions, emoluments, perquisites or rewards dueto me Here or Elsewhere on account of the following virtue, to wit andthat is to say . . . . . that all women are to me equally ugly." Thelast eight words being filled in in ink by Mr. Montagu-Montague.
My poor friend duly signed it. "These are the jokes," said the agent.They were boldly written on three slips of paper. "They don't seemvery funny," said the other when he had read them. "You are immune,"said Mr. Montagu-Montague, "but anyone else who hears them will simplydie of laughter: that we guarantee."
An American firm had bought at the price of waste paper a hundredthousand copies of The Dictionary of Electricity written whenelectricity was new,--and it had turned out that even at the time itsauthor had not rightly grasped his subject,--the firm had paidL10,000 to a respectable English paper (no other in fact thanthe Briton) for the use of its name, and to obtain orders for TheBriton Dictionary of Electricity was the occupation of my unfortunatefriend. He seems to have had a way with him. Apparently he knew by aglance at a man, or a look round at his garden, whether to recommendthe book as "an absolutely up-to-date achievement, the finest thing ofits kind in the world of modern science" or as "at once quaint andimperfect, a thing to buy and to keep as a tribute to those dear oldtimes that are gone." So he went on with this quaint though usualbusiness, putting aside the memory of that night as an occasion onwhich he had "somewhat exceeded" as they say in circles where a spadeis called neither a spade nor an agricultural implement but is nevermentioned at all, being altogether too vulgar. And then one night heput on his suit of dress clothes and found the three jokes in thepocket. That was perhaps a shock. He seems to have thought it overcarefully then, and the end of it was he gave a dinner at the club totwenty of the members. The dinner would do no harm he thought--mighteven help the business, and if the joke came off he would be a wittyfellow, and two jokes still up his sleeve.
Whom he invited or how the dinner went I do not know for he began tospeak rapidly and came straight to the point, as a stick that nears acataract suddenly goes faster and faster. The dinner was duly served,the port went round, the twenty men were smoking, two waitersloitered, when he after carefully reading the best of the jokes toldit down the table. They laughed. One man accidentally inhaled hiscigar smoke and spluttered, the two waiters overheard and titteredbehind their hands, one man, a bit of a raconteur himself, quiteclearly wished not to laugh, but his veins swelled dangerously intrying to keep it back, and in the end he laughed too. The joke hadsucceeded; my friend smiled at the thought; he wished to say littledeprecating things to the man on his right; but the laughter did notstop and the waiters would not be silent. He waited, and waitedwondering; the laughter went roaring on, distinctly louder now, andthe waiters as loud as any. It had gone on for three or four minuteswhen this frightful thought leaped up all at once in his mind: _it wasforced laughter!_ However could anything have induced him to tell sofoolish a joke? He saw its absurdity as in revelation; and the more hethought of it as these people laughed at him, even the waiters too,the more he felt that he could never lift up his head with his brothertouts again. And still the laughter went roaring and choking on. Hewas very angry. There was not much use in having a friend, he thought,if one silly joke could not be overlooked; he had fed them too. Andthen he felt that he had no friends at all, and his anger faded away,and a great unhappiness came down on him, and he got quietly up andslunk from the room and slipped away from the club. Poor man, hescarcely had the heart next morning even to glance at the papers, butyou did not need to glance at them, big type was bandied about thatday as though it were common type, the words of the headlines staredat you; and the headlines said:--Twenty-Two Dead Men at a Club.
Yes, he saw it then: th
He thought out swiftly, and remembers clear as a nightmare, the driveto Victoria Station, the boat-train to Dover and going disguised tothe boat: and on the boat pleasantly smiling, almost obsequious, twoconstables that wished to speak for a moment with Mr. Watkyn-Jones.That was his name.
In a third-class carriage with handcuffs on his wrists, with forcedconversation when any, he returned between his captors to Victoria tobe tried for murder at the High Court of Bow.
At the trial he was defended by a young barrister of considerableability who had gone into the Cabinet in order to enhance his forensicreputation. And he was ably defended. It is no exaggeration to saythat the speech for the defence showed it to be usual, even naturaland right, to give a dinner to twenty men and to slip away withoutever saying a word, leaving all, with the waiters, dead. That was theimpression left in the minds of the jury. And Mr. Watkyn-Jones felthimself practically free, with all the advantages of his awfulexperience, and his two jokes intact. But lawyers are stillexperimenting with the new act which allows a prisoner to giveevidence. They do not like to make no use of it for fear they may bethought not to know of the act, and a lawyer who is not in touch withthe very latest laws is soon regarded as not being up to date and hemay drop as much as L50,000 a year in fees. And therefore thoughit always hangs their clients they hardly like to neglect it.
Mr. Watkyn-Jones was put in the witness box. There he told the simpletruth, and a very poor affair it seemed after the impassioned andbeautiful things that were uttered by the counsel for the defence. Menand women had wept when they heard that. They did not weep when theyheard Watkyn-Jones. Some tittered. It no longer seemed a right andnatural thing to leave one's guests all dead and to fly the country.Where was Justice, they asked, if anyone could do that? And when hisstory was told the judge rather happily asked if he could make him dieof laughter too. And what was the joke? For in so grave a place as aCourt of Justice no fatal effects need be feared. And hesitatingly theprisoner pulled from his pocket the three slips of paper: andperceived for the first time that the one on which the first and bestjoke had been written had become quite blank. Yet he could rememberit, and only too clearly. And he told it from memory to the Court.
"An Irishman once on being asked by his master to buy a morning papersaid in his usual witty way, 'Arrah and begorrah and I will be afterwishing you the top of the morning.'"
No joke sounds quite so good the second time it is told, it seems tolose something of its essence, but Watkyn-Jones was not prepared forthe awful stillness with which this one was received; nobody smiled;and it had killed twenty-two men. The joke was bad, devilish bad;counsel for the defence was frowning, and an usher was looking in alittle bag for something the judge wanted. And at this moment, asthough from far away, without his wishing it, there entered theprisoner's head, and shone there and would not go, this old badproverb: "As well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb." The jury seemedto be just about to retire. "I have another joke," said Watkyn-Jones,and then and there he read from the second slip of paper. He watchedthe paper curiously to see if it would go blank, occupying his mindwith so slight a thing as men in dire distress very often do, and thewords were almost immediately expunged, swept swiftly as if by a hand,and he saw the paper before him as blank as the first. And they werelaughing this time, judge, jury, counsel for the prosecution, audienceand all, and the grim men that watched him upon either side. There wasno mistake about this joke.
He did not stay to see the end, and walked out with his eyes fixed onthe ground, unable to bear a glance to the right or left. And sincethen he has wandered, avoiding ports and roaming lonely places. Twoyears have known him on the Highland roads, often hungry, alwaysfriendless, always changing his district, wandering lonely on with hisdeadly joke.
Sometimes for a moment he will enter inns, driven by cold and hunger,and hear men in the evening telling jokes and even challenging him;but he sits desolate and silent, lest his only weapon should escapefrom him and his last joke spread mourning in a hundred cots. Hisbeard has grown and turned grey and is mixed with moss and weeds, sothat no one, I think, not even the police, would recognise him now forthat dapper tout that sold The Briton Dictionary of Electricity insuch a different land.
He paused, his story told, and then his lip quivered as though hewould say more, and I believe he intended then and there to yield uphis deadly joke on that Highland road and to go forth then with histhree blank slips of paper, perhaps to a felon's cell, with one moremurder added to his crimes, but harmless at last to man. I thereforehurried on, and only heard him mumbling sadly behind me, standingbowed and broken, all alone in the twilight, perhaps telling over andover even then the last infernal joke.
THE END